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"Racial hygiene in Germany remained until 1926 a purely academic and scientific movement. It was the Americans who busied themselves earnestly about the subject."1
-- German historian Reinhod Müller, 1934
Overview
In 1921, three German scientists--Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz, and Erwin Baur--published Outline of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene. Revised and updated every few years, the two-volume work was used as a textbook in German medical schools. It also provided scientific legitimacy for Adolf Hitler's National Socialist or Nazi party. Hitler read the 1923 edition during the year he spent in prison for an attempted overthrow of the German government. He referred to it in Mein Kampf, his account of his own political beliefs and plans for a new German empire. In reviewing the book, Fritz Lenz noted with pride that Hitler had borrowed many of Lenz's own ideas. Lenz and his colleagues, in turn, borrowed many of their ideas from American eugenicists.
Throughout their work, Fischer, Lenz, and Baur cite research by such American scholars as Henry Goddard, Charles Davenport, Harry Laughlin, Carl Brigham, and Lewis Terman. Lenz, in particular, insisted that there were no differences between the positions taken by American and German eugenicists. Both were "accustomed to thinking biologically."2 Although Germany lagged behind in the application of eugenics to public policy, Lenz was confident that as eugenic education proceeded in Germany, eugenic laws would follow.
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Words of Caution
Not everyone applauded American sterilization laws and other eugenic measures. Oswald Bumke, a professor of psychiatry at Munich, warned in 1932:
If one were to drag the discussion regarding sterilization into today's arena of political struggle, then one would probably pretty soon hear less talk about the mentally ill, but more regarding Aryans and non-Aryans, and of the blond Germanic race and the less valuable round-skulls. It is certainly unlikely that anything positive would arise from this; on the contrary, both science in general and genealogy and eugenics in particular would be damaged in ways from which they would not easily recover.3
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Facing History Resources
• Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts) 2002, Chapter 8, "The Nazi Connection."
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Print and Video Resources
• The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kühl (Oxford University Press, New York) Chapter 2, 1994.
• Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis by Robert N. Proctor (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts) 1988.
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1 Quoted in Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis by Robert N. Proctor (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts) 1988, p. 98.
2 Ibid., p. 50.
3 Quoted in Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany 1900-1945 by Michael Burleigh (Cambridge University Press) 1994, p40. 349.
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